August

Things happen when you run a rental property operation. That’s why there’s the phrase you see on bumper stickers that says “**** Happens.” As such, two primary choices present themselves: Be absolutely rigid and unbending in your policies and procedures….or…..Be absolutely flexible and have strength in your policies and procedures. What I mean is captured in this video below. As you watch it, consider the possible scenarios in your minds and do the metaphorical application to your rental properties, your tenants, and your landlord clients if you are a property manager. So….Is your operation flexible and strong enough to break your ‘cement blocks’? Or will you end up crushing all 27 bones in your hand?

You’ve heard of Crowdfunding for all kinds of funky new products and companies, but real estate? No, you’re not doing a double take. Yup. It’s here. Check out this article about crowdfunding and how it can impact your Retirement Plans. http://money.usnews.com/investing/articles/2016-08-23/pros-and-cons-of-real-estate-crowdfunding-for-retirement

Over many years of coaching Landlords, Investors, and Real Estate Agents I’ve come to this conclusion: Your Dreams and Nightmares are always about THE SAME THING. Your most dreamed about issue? It is always making large amounts of money so they can have Financial Freedom. It’s you visualizing their bank account balance swelling up. It’s you visualizing your ROI numbers and seeing it start with a larger integer than last year. Your most Nightmarish issue? It is always procrastinating the grunt work of actually running the financials on your rental properties. It’s “stepping on the scale”. It’s the attitude of “What I don’t know can’t hurt me, right?” “If I don’t look at the numbers, they’ll certainly improve on their own….” I’ve learned that I can ask clients to run a simple worksheet and they don’t want to do it. They’d rather talk to 10 life insurance salesmen than actually get a […]

Questions. We all have them. (If you don’t, run away from real estate.) Here’s the Top 20 questions asked by landlords and investors when choosing to hire a property management company. Some are deeper questions than they might seem the first time you read them, which is why the first question on the list is the first question on the list. If you are thinking about them in the correct mindset, you should realize within 2 breaths that the questions spawn subordinate questions and will take you down a rabbit hole even further. What do you charge? If I have a question and send in an email or call, what is the expected response time from your company? Is the prop mgr available on weekends if issues arise? How do you handle repairs? How does money get to me each month? What happens if the tenant doesn’t pay rent? What […]

Good afternoon! We have published the YTD Rental Stats for the 14 market areas we track in the Indianapolis area. We have also changed this to a protected file format since it is proprietary data analysis unlike anyone else provides and have started to charge for this data. The whopping amount for access? $5 To change your membership from the free level to the Financial Freedom Member Level, click here. Skip the Starbucks once a week to skip faster into your Financial Freedom. Do it. You’ll thank me each month as you keep watching your bank account gro July 2016 YTD Indy Rental Stats

“The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research noted this week that stocks have reached today’s valuations “only ahead of the three largest equity market declines in the last century.” Certainly NOT what I wanted to read while sipping my first cup of coffee this morning. WTF??? But….as in all good thought-provoking pieces it’s valuable. Yes, a bit of a butt-puckering scary article but still valuable. Here’s why I think it’s valuable: If asset prices plummet, we will see opportunities to pick up new properties from distress situations. So perhaps keep some of your powder dry to seize these rare market fluctuations. It’s time to re-evaluate each of the properties in your portfolio in a kind of stress-test scenario. For example, do you know what the Break Even rent value is for each of your properties? (Hint: If you don’t know how to calculate this, send me a message and I’ll walk you […]